a dream of herbs
by NegativeGravity
Summary: are ye happy? no; art thou? — Kariya summons an unlikely Servant, and the world lurches a little to the left.


**title:** a dream of herbs  
**summary:** _are ye happy?_ no; art thou? — Kariya summons an unlikely Servant, and the world lurches a little to the left.  
**raw word count:** 5027  
**notes:** cross-upload from AO3. I assume familiarity with (real-life) Arthurian lore, so YMMV somewhat. Homura is _slightly_ OOC due to the Berserker class' Mad Enhancement, but otherwise, this is really just what it says on the tin, plus character parallels.  
**notes2:** updated 29/05/20, with a better polish to the prose. :]

* * *

.

.

.

The World and its Will find strange ways to enrich and amuse the slow river of their endless aeons.

Most of these ways are perverse, etching cruel, comic tragedies.

* * *

In Arthurian mythology — which is to say, in fabulously historical fact — only three of Arthur's knights may stake a claim to purity: Sir Bors the Younger, tricked into siring a son by Claire, daughter of King Brandegoris, but nonetheless as pure in body as he is in soul, and thus worthy of the white shroud given to the poorman and the martyr; Sir Percival, or Peredur, that is, _Steelspear,_ pure indeed in all things, fresh in every sinew as the flowers spilling from God's breath, his innocence preserved in a cloister of clear amber by both his sweet temperament and the savagery nourished in his mother's woodlands; Sir Galahad, who did indeed mind himself better than most nuns, though his innocence had been spoiled in the birthbed to a dark and rare wine.

That the three of them left questing for the Grail is common knowledge; it is the matter of who attained it that remains obscured.

_It was Percival,_ some say, sticking their tongues to the backs of their teeth with the honeyed curling of his name; _In the chapel he fell silent, wishing for a moment's rest __and nothing__ more; and his lack of worldly want, his shepherd's soul, __it t__ook God so; He turned to__ His angels and sa__id,__ bring forth My chalice for this Son to drink__from._

_It was Galahad,_ say others. _God and His angels were all taken with him, with his valour, with how, like Mary yet unlike her, he did not let his h__eirage__ stain him._

These latter folks forget they lived well before the Son of God was born, and that Mariam's own birth is clean only in Catholicism, its myriad modern child-faiths notwithstanding.

Alas: few think of Bors, poor Bors who bore his father's name about him like an anchor noose, like a woodworm in the heartroot, like something goring through him — like Apocalypse, like shame, the heavy shame in duty, born from a humble man's pride.

For, well; he was a splendid knight, yes, and an able fighter, yes; but he was also so _plain._ How could the extraordinary ever grace the common, when there are far fairer fleshes for it to choose from?

* * *

Zōken had been rather secretive in regards to the nature of the artefact he was procuring; Kariya hadn't worried, mostly because it was hard to think around the searing edges of his agony, let alone _worry_, but also because he knew that, for all his faults — of which there were many — Zōken would never gamble with a light hand.

Even if he was only playing for a laugh, as he was doing now.

The Grail has selected him as a Master, and his hand burns red with thorns in branding proof. Off to the side of the pool, Zōken grins, an icon of Pestilence, bloated ashgreen on the bones of both his and Famine's horse. He taps his cane against the heavy stone floor. Says, "Come."

The click of his wooden zori resonates, a doomsday metronome.

Kariya dresses quickly — as quickly as he's able through the spasms, convulsions worsened by the fatigue of his general emaciation. He touches a hand to where his ribs jut, to the caved plain of his abdomen; he's always been a slim man, but he's worn so thin, so thin. He zips his sweater shut.

_I'__m a right fright, I am._ Strangely enough, the horror of his self makes him smile.

He rights his waistband again, casts a sidelong glance at Sakura, her small white form barely visible under the writhing worms. One violet eye is fixed on the ceiling, unblinking, unseeing. She's a slow heartbeat away from being a porcelain doll.

His own heart clenches painfully, and he swallows it down. The guilt is almost too much to bear.

"Have the worms eaten your brain down to the stem, boy? I said, _come._ Or do you want the girl to be my heir, after all?"

He breathes in, out. Ignores the wet wheeze giving from his lungs — something is moving there, and he doesn't care to know what. Thinks, _She's worth it, old son. Every pain, every h__umiliation, every ruin; s__he's worth it._

Another voice in him says: _Besides, w__hat kind of man can't even __burn himself to __save one little girl?_

He has no answer to that. He follows after Zōken, limping.

In the adjacent hall, built so low into the earth its floor shares levels with the worm-pool, Zōken handles him a swaddle of cloth with great and uncharacteristic care. The summoning circle, linking magus to Root and making body of the space between them, has already been carved into the ground, a crest of decay. It's blood — dark garnet blood, like rubies adorning a gored throat. It's as wretched as it is a beautiful sight to behold.

_Just like your girl,_ that other voice in him says, and God, he is so close to madness, isn't he? He's kneeling at the gate of it, half fallen, half in prayer.

He swallows hard, again. It was easy enough to pretend he had no interest in magic when he was running from it, half a world away and trying to scrub his soul clean of his father, of their wretched inheritance, every small act of kindness another throw of purifying salts, of holy water lurched his way. It's not so easy now.

Softly, he undoes the fabric.

* * *

Every knight who partook in communion at the Round Table was, in time, granted a sword forged by the fae; Arthur had three — and the Rhongomyniad beside them, because four was death and death the number of his name. Mordred had Clarent, who'd meant hope before it meant betrayal, and the Sun-Knight wielded the bright sister to Excalibur, the burning Galatine.

Yet only Lancelot's Arondight shone lily-pale and graceful, holding the eye captive as it was arched in slaughter, unearthly where a sword should be so real a thing, so palpable. It was as if the metal rippled with live light, drunk from the air around it as vast waters drink the sky down and drown it in their chests.

Kariya runs his fingers over the fragment, careful; still the jagged edges reveal and spill the wisping of his veins. The origin of the metal, its work and design, are all beyond suspicion. Nothing so exquisite may be mortal.

Long ago, this had been part of Arondight's scabbard. It held the moon, mistress of madmen, mother of women; it loved it.

It was loved back by it. _Maybe it still is,_ Kariya thinks, hopes feverishly. _Maybe it can save us._

He looks to Zōken, lips parted around a question he doesn't quite know how to pose. _Is this how you see me, then, old man? A wife-thief, someone damned for love, for foolishness?_ But the string of his furies answers itself: and yes, he is — a truth without a counterargument It stays his tongue, but nonetheless the smaller question hangs: _Is this your blessing?_ The many meanings of the gift are too well-matched.

Instead, he says: "You have as dark a sense of humour as always."

Zōken grins. "Go on," he says after a moment's pause, and Kariya takes the shard out from the cloth, hands bleeding where the sharp of it touches. It is, inexplicably, like holding a heart.

Even in this dim a place, it still finds light to swallow, to make it bright.

He wonders briefly how it would feel, were he to impale himself on it, were he to let it know his taste; would it accept him? Would it concur with the vampire's assessment that he has some of its master in him? Would it spit out from his guts — and if so, would it arch in disgust or in a throe of pleasure?

Distantly he is aware of the lust-worms eating at him, suckling on his marrow, on his circuits, those spectral, brimming veins that map and stigmatize him. It's worse than being drunk. Worse than being high, really, and he's chewed his fair share of strange roots in his aimless peregrinage. It's a stupid thought on all accounts.

Still: _I am no Lancelot,_ he tells the haze, and it is important to him that it knows this. _It's not Aoi I want — __it's __not what Tokiomi has. It's Sakura. I want her to be safe, happy. T__o__ have the life that's rightfully hers. That's all. __That's…_

The fragment settles on the stone with a soft _clink_, like fine bone-china being set for dinner. He has a queer, fevered feeling that he's the main and only course.

He withdraws from the circle, wipes his bloodied hands down on the tops of his thighs.

_No, that's not the whole truth,_ he amends, and the rite tumbles from his lips with water's ease, sparks the boundary alive. _I want to be happy, too. With her._

* * *

In another world, Lancelot's lilymoon armour is blackened by the lines added to the incantation, and he is incarnated for Kariya's sake as Berserker, all curse and absolution and dark blessing. Less mad with heavy things, he would perhaps have told his Master: _You and I are not as different as you __want to __think. I, too, am rotten, __for all the worms that crawl through me are not so literal._

As it was, he could only anguish — for both his Master and the little girl they couldn't save.

But this is not that world.

* * *

The light of the circle, bright lilac at first, bruises quickly — blackens until it matches the skin of late September plums. Kariya is dumbfounded, his mouth too hot around his own breath; this is another part of magic he'd forgotten. How _good_ it feels, in the worst way imaginable.

The worms in him are raving as doomsayers might, should Christ rise and walk the world again, kiss every last one on the mouth.

Then the fumes begin to clear, and all his pleasure dies, turns to ash on his tongue. Even Zōken seems taken aback.

"Are you my Master?"

She can't be older than fifteen, a slip of a girl with narrow shoulders and too-pale skin, her face and hands made paler by the black of her long hair, the dark of her clothes, a deep smoke-grey.

Kariya feels like stabbing himself, again. He thinks of Sakura and squashes the urge. "You are not Lancelot," he manages, dumbly.

"No," the girl says, and a shadow of confusion flights over her gaunt face. "I am not."

Off to the side, Zōken laughs. "A little girl. How very delightful." He taps his cane against the floor, faux-contemplative. "A testament to your lacking skill, or the Grail's mocking. Which one do you suppose it is, eh, boy?"

"I would not laugh so freely if I were you," the girl interjects, unruffled. She doesn't dignify the old man with a look, let alone a withering one. It's really something of a minor marvel. "Your existence is tethered to this plane by strings far thinner than the ones tethering mine, and I am, in essence, a glorified familiar." There's an arrogant cock to her head. "Where on the food chain does that leave you?"

Zōken's mouth twists horribly; in amusement or anger, Kariya can't tell. "I hope you fight half as well as you talk, little girl. For my useless son's sake." He starts to slink off, putrid shape casting distorted shadows. Pauses. "And for my own amusement, of course." His footsteps echo as he goes, a steady rap of bone on marble.

"Fucking ghoul," the girl sneers, and seems rather surprised by her own outburst. She assesses her clothes, lips pursing into an ever-grimmer line. "It seems that my summoning under the Berserker class has rendered me quite uncouth," she drones, eyes returning to him, and God, she is to be his champion, isn't she? He feels sick.

_I can't make a little girl fight for me. I can't make a little girl fight to save another. I just — what have I done? What have I fucking done?_

"I ask again," she says, and the slow of her voice snaps his eyes to hers, arrests him, butterfly pinned to cutting board. "Are you my Master?"

"Yes," he rasps, abjectly, and with the pact between them sealed, his face contorts into an expression of raw grief such as she's ever seen. _Interesting,_ she thinks, ignoring how her own knees seem to want to give. "I am so sorry. I didn't mean to — I can't make you —" He stumbles over his own words, heaves. Covers his mouth with a shaking hand. "I meant to summon a knight."

"Well," she says, fanning out the ribbon of her long hair, "That you have."

She steps from the circle, faraway eyes entertaining a private memory.

* * *

In the seventy-seventh timeline, she impales Kyōko on her own spear. Madoka's dead already; so are Mami and Sayaka. This is her way of showing mercy: Walpurgisnacht won't get to tear into her, core her like an apple.

"Some fucking knight you are," Kyōko spits. "Can't save your princess, so you—" the rest is a broken wheeze. Her left lung caves around the metal.

Homura doesn't wipe the blood from her face, doesn't move to comfort her. "I'm sorry I'm not Sayaka," she says, and means it, too. Kyōko breaks down into ugly sobs, and something very human in her worms its way to the surface, makes her want to crush her to her chest.

To break her Soul Gem is another mercy, she tells herself. It'd take too long to bleed out — she'd wick like a spent candle, choking on her own life.

* * *

Kariya stares at her, still on his knees where he'd crumbled earlier. He is burning up with so many things, the cold barely registers through the thin fabric of his sweatpants — power, shame, guilt, despair. Fear, above all. She crouches, brings the strange geodes of her eyes to his level. This close she resembles a life-sized doll, one carved by some obscure master automaton of the seventeen-hundreds. He has to fight the urge to touch her cheeks, pinch them to convince himself she's real.

"So," she says. "My Master."

"Kariya," he says, shuffling uncomfortably. "It's — don't call me Master. Please."

"Kariya," she amends, kindly enough. "What is your wish?"

He tells her, everything rushing from him in a great, unbroken flow: Sakura's origin, her adoption, what she means to him; the ease with which her father had signed her over to a sure damnation, how her mother had looked away, accompliced, herself damned. His horror when he'd come home, Zōken's proposition. His own damning.

The girl listens as though raptured, so quiet and so still in thought not even breath wafts from her — a little gargoyle. An idol-corpse, like the first gods of the steppe.

When he is done, she pushes the hair away from her face and fixes him with an unreadable look. "And you are stupid enough to believe him?"

"Of course not! But if he has the Grail — if he has immortality. He won't need me, and he won't need Sakura as a vessel. He won't care where we go."

"Where you go," she echoes, disbelieving. "Kariya. You do realize you're dying. You do realize that the energy the War requires you to expend not only to upkeep the existence of something like a Servant, but to fight as an active participant is likely to kill you." He opens his mouth to say that yes, he is perfectly aware of just how grim his prospects are, but she holds her hand up in a silencing motion. "Let's assume that you do live long enough to win. You might have months left after that. Weeks. Hours." She crushes her bottom lip between her teeth so hard she draws blood. Anger this fickle is new to her, but she has neither the time nor the patience to remain surprised. "Yes, the old man wouldn't care. And what do you think that would mean for her?"

He knows. _Of course_ he knows. "Still," he says, face screwing up again in that sublime, unparalleled anguish that makes her think of a little girl in red-framed glasses, alone at the end of the world. "What would you have me do? Turn the other way, like Aoi? Be another accomplice to her suffering? I refuse. I'd rather die trying. No matter what it takes from me, it's alright as long as she can be happy."

She looks at him oddly for the longest time, tracing the worms that slither just beneath his skin, the mist his breath leaves in the cool air. "You're an idiot," she says, finally, and it is not unkind. She rises, rocking back on the balls of her feet. "If you think she can be happy on her own, you're either a moron or those worms have eaten too much of your brain." She looks away, even as she offers him her hand, even as she pulls him to his feet. "…But I do understand how you feel. I'd sell the world for what is dear to me. I'd betray anything. Everything. Even myself." At this she smiles, and it's an ugly, broken thing. She still won't look at him. "I have."

* * *

In yet another world, Akemi Homura becomes the Devil. Theirs is an old tale: the Betrayer is always the one who loves the Betrayed the most. Lucifer and God, Cain and Abel; Judas and the Saviour. Mordred. Lancelot.

Arthur a gallowstone between them.

* * *

It's a sick sight. "Your old man's a monster," she says, dry tone not quite matching just how bright her eyes are burning with rage.

Kariya holds onto his mostly useless left arm as if trying to shield himself from the world, slip away to a quieter place. "I told you it isn't a pleasant image."

She summons her shield, dialturns it.

The world stills.

She crosses the space between them in three strides, touches her hands to his throat; he gasps into movement, pale eyes uncomprehending, shifting wildly for a moment before settling. She remembers Madoka, the same look of startled wonder on her lovely face whenever she brought them to that nooked space between seconds.

But Madoka is worlds away, God in some and prisoner regardless, and there is no more use in dwelling on the past than there is in laments. She brushes the thought away.

_I'm not even Homura, strictly speaking. I'm just a copy of a copy_.

"I want you to listen very carefully," she says, letting her arms fall to her sides. Kariya nods rather stiffly. "I am not a recorded mythological figure; this is to our advantage. Assassin and Caster are my natural classes—" here she bites her lip, seems to turn something over in her head, "—though I suppose certain iterations of me could be summoned under Archer. That I have incarnated as a Berserker is also to our advantage; my Mad Enhancement is low, but it's reinforced me. It's also made it a lot easier for me to use my strongest Noble Phantasm, should we meet an enemy that will warrant it." Something about the way she says it makes him think she dreads that kind of battle. She holds up her right arm, displaying her little shield. He takes this as his cue to inspect it, and he is startled to discover just how much the working of the metal resembles Arondight's scabbard, even dipped in darkness as it is. "My principal power is the manipulation of time. Though you've probably gathered that."

His eyes stray from the shield to the pit, where the worms, ever so tireless in their rutting, are frozen in muddy rippling shapes. "I have, yeah."

"After a certain number of uses," she continues, "I can perform a jump. I can go back to a specific moment in time — not as a reset, though. The continuum simply splits, branches off into a what-if. It's not a solution. It's simply…" She seeks the right words to describe it, and comes up empty-handed. Her mouth purses in annoyance. She loathes being inarticulate. It reminds her too much of sick days in another life, when after a long bedrest she didn't know the answer in English or Literature.

Still, he understands what she means well enough. "An alternative." He looks to Sakura, small and drowned and broken, and his lungs almost give. He swallows bile and worse. "If you can do that," he rasps, "Or _when_ you can do that. Would you—?"

She gives a minute incline of her head. "It's what I was going to propose. I can kill the old man right after he brings her home, before he has a chance to throw her in the pit." She pauses, head cocked. "Would your brother be present at this time?"

He tries to recall; it's sluggish. "No. Zōken summoned him home afterwards."

"That version of you might have to dispose of him himself, then," she says. "I'll do my best to track him down, though, provided I have enough time."

Kariya summons the sanity required to look mildly horrified. "Is it necessary?"

"You're technically disowned, correct? With your father gone, her guardianship reverts to him, as does the family fortune. It's too messy." She's plotting triple murder in the same tone the weathermen impart their meteorological prognoses. It's awful, but by now enough of him is eroded that he can properly respect it.

"Right," he says, already making peace.

"In the meantime," she continues, looking to where Sakura is buried beneath the worms, "Let's do something for this version of you. Where is his real body?"

Kariya grimaces. "In her. He's too much of a self-preserving coward to keep it in his swarm."

Berserker doesn't bother masking her disgust. "Can you remove it?"

He nods, and she's off like a gun.

* * *

Fifteen hours later — passed in a fraction of their actual span thanks to Berserker's Phantasm — the worms are out of Sakura's body and Kariya is the only trueblooded scion left to the long and decayed line of the Makiri-Matō.

Taking the crest into himself had hurt like a right motherfucker, but he supposes it will be worth it in the long run.

"Oh," Berserker says, her prana reserves surging as his body adjusts, as the foreign circuitry yields and welds itself to his. "Oh. Filthy as it is, this…"

"Yeah," he grunts, doubles over. She steadies him with the flat of her hand, guides him to the nearest chair. He's still out of breath when he sprawls in it, graceless. "If there's one thing my family really knows, it's power."

"He who lives by the sword shall die by it," she half-says, half-quotes.

Kariya laughs, and the sound of it is still so tired. "Fond of Greek tragedies, then?"

Her lips purse, an expression that's threatening to become too easily familiar. "No. They're cautionary tales that vilify the victims; I despise them."

* * *

In another world, Lancelot loses his battle with Arthur; the Grail, corrupted, fractures. Fuyuki is dismorphed into a mirror of Hell, and a certain mad priest gathers his libations from the carnage — finds that their loss and depravity is still not bold enough to fill and sate him. Pitiless, pitless. Kotomine Kirei is an unworthy inheritor.

In that same world, Kariya dies in Sakura's numb little arms, and her fate is sealed. The Fifth War is accelerated, and misery follows misery as pearls in a string knotted from catgut.

But this is not that world.

In this world, Kariya's miniature knight is astute enough to unravel the proverbial Gordian knot. They fight smartly, conserving as much of his life and sanity as possible. Kirei is the first one she kills — a murder savage, almost instinctual. He reminds her of Kyūbey. With him gone, Tokiomi survives long enough to lose his temper and be impaled by his own Servant.

On his own, Gilgamesh is troublesome, but ultimately proves to be inconsequential. She has enough prana stored to cage and absorb him by shifting into her Akuma shape, and the energy this act of cannibalism supplies her with is more than enough to see the War through to its completion.

Kariya attains the Grail. His selfish, common, simple wish is granted: "I want Sakura and I to live together, long and happy and healthy."

He is cleansed of his worms. The War is not without loss, but its larger catastrophes are averted.

Homura's hand stills on the shield. _And you?_ the Irisviel who is not Irisviel asks, preternaturally maternal. Her fingers settle on the sides of Homura's face, and the girl allows herself to bask in the touch. _What do __**you**__ want, darling?_

Her eyes betray her. _The same,_ they say. _Of course I want the same. I want to live happily ever after with Madoka. A normal, safe life, ignorant of higher magic, of what powers entropy._

"You've done enough for me," Kariya says, bashful and kind and almost too bright to look at. "For us. You can…you _should_ have your wish granted. It's only right. I won't mind if it means you have to break your other promise. You've done so much already."

She bites her lip to blood. Bors can attain the Grail, but the Devil can never be truly happy.

One way or another, her soul is still in an egg, caged and caging; she is, and always will be, the Nutcracker — glutton for punishment, Koschei, laughably deathless.

She shakes her head, slowly. "It's too late for me. It's always been too late. Your Grail is strong, but not strong enough to enact that kind of miracle." She smiles, and though it's thin, it's the only content expression Kariya has seen on her face. His heart breaks. It's like losing a daughter. "Thank you, though. For everything."

He speaks, but whatever it is he wants to say is lost. She's already turned the dial.

* * *

In yet another world, Matō Kariya receives a strange postcard.

_Come back to Fuyuki_, it says, the penmanship so neat it seems printed. _Tōsaka Sakura is in grave danger. Zōken set to adopt her._

It could be a bad joke. It could be.

He still boards the plane, jitters his way from São Paulo to Tokyo and from there to Fuyuki, riding a suspiciously undercrowded shinkansen. He's no less anxious when he hails a cab at South Station — his pulse only crawls down from tachycardia once he finds Sakura in the kitchen, looking a little confused but otherwise no worse for wear, playing what looks to be a game of old hag over the dinner table with a girl that can't be older than fifteen and whose face he cannot place despite vividly remembering its features. It's as though he's seen her in a dream, but the dream is buried.

"Ah. Your uncle's home," she says, and Sakura looks up from her cards, beaming, still too shy to run to him without Rin's encouragement.

_Unharmed indeed, then._ Kariya breathes a sigh of relief, crossing the distance between them himself to ruffle her hair. "I am. Hello, Sakura."

She presses her head up into his palm. Says, very softly, "H-hello. Welcome home."

He's so flooded with relief and love he forgets his questions.

The stranger pushes an envelope towards him. "My formal congratulations, Matō Kariya. As of right now, you are the head and sole heir of your family, as well Matō Sakura's legal guardian." She lifts herself to her feet, chunky Mary-Jane heels clicking. "You are also the heir to the hand I was playing. I'm rather short on time, I'm afraid."

She offers Sakura a pleasant smile, and then she's off like a gun. "I hate it when she does that," Kariya says, forlornly, then catches himself. _Huh. So I do know her. Or at least I think I do. But from where?_

There's a terrible itch in his brain, but he'll pick at it later.

For now: "Ah, well," he says, cheerfully nonchalant. "It's too bad she couldn't stay. Have you eaten, Sakura?"

She shakes her head. "Not since lunch. Big sister asked, but I didn't want to bother her."

"Let's make something, then, shall we? I'm starving."

The happy expression on her face is worth it. Whatever fucked up thing's been afoot while he had his back turned to the city — it's worth it.

* * *

There's another envelope waiting for him at the bottom of the pit in the basement. No worms in sight, no Zōken; it's all been scrubbed. If he didn't know better he'd think he dreamed the magic, the horrors of this house, his childhood in it. Three stories up Sakura is tucked securely into her new bed, and over the past hour he's gathered from the first one that his father, brother, and nephew are all deceased. It chills him a little to discover that he couldn't care less.

Inside this one, there is only a letter. In the same spidery lettering that had been on the postcard, the following is written curtly: _Take care of the girl, and hone your magic. Hone hers, too. I had more time than expected, so I researched it — Imaginary Numbers. She's so rare her father didn't know what to do with her. Your father wouldn't have known, either. __You are better, so m__ake sure you __do__ better._

The writer's name is conspicuously absent from the bottom.

Kariya smiles. Of course she'd deem that detail unimportant.

* * *

The World and its Will find strange ways to take their entertainment; most of these ways are perverse.

Still. Life is all future, but also only echoes:

_**Someone almost pure has taken / takes / will take the Grail. The Devil was / is / will be almost happy. The dial turned / turns / will turn.**_

Fate, if diverted enough by the fire in a choice, will allow it.

.

.

.

* * *

_**fin.**_


End file.
